The imitable R.L. Dane posted a comment recently about the number of posts I write in a given year: Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro’s output for 2024 […] HOW?!? I’m struggling to blergh out 50 “blosts” a year, and dude is a one-man blogging empire. Firstly, is something that precedes secondly. And thirdly, it’s astounding what one can achieve when one discusses themselves in the first person for some reason, and eschew...

Thank you all for your continued support, while I've been quiet there are a few builds still in the works. I have a couple of the new higher-res official Raspberry Pi DSI displays in hand, and I am working on publishing a new enclosure series in early June. For those builds the Pelican 1150 will be truly optional! If you're looking to update your enclosure and have an 1150-based build, my design will really focus on updates with mostly just 3D printed parts, hopefully making it cool and econo...

Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and long-lasting effects of Reagan crushing the PATCO strike. But that's just my opinion, you know, maybe airplanes got too woke. In any case, it's an interesting time to consider how weird...

This llama.cpp server vision support via libmtmd pull request - via Hacker News - was merged earlier today. The PR finally adds full support for vision models to the excellent llama.cpp project. It's documented on this page , but the more detailed technical details are covered here . Here are my notes on getting it working on a Mac. llama.cpp models are usually distributed as .gguf files. This project introduces a new variant of those called mmproj , for multimodal projector. libm...

Kinesh Satiya Introduction In a digital advertising platform, a robust feedback system is essential for the lifecycle and success of an ad campaign. This system comprises of diverse sub-systems designed to monitor, measure, and optimize ad campaigns. At Netflix, we embarked on a journey to build a robust event processing platform that not only meets the current demands but also scales for future needs. This blog post delves into the architectural evolution and technical decisions that underpin o...

I have a bookmarklet called “Edit” which, when clicked, takes me to the editing page of GitHub that corresponds to the page on my website that I am viewing. I described how the edit bookmarklet works in my post “ My static site editing bookmarklet ” earlier this year. Since then, I have been using the bookmarklet almost every day. My most common use is to add content to the wiki-like pages on my website, like my movies list. Because editing a page on my static site is now only one cl...

Quarto (which this blog is built on) recently added support for Observable JS , which lets you make really cool interactive and animated visualizations. I have an odd fixation with finding new tools to visualize data, and while JS is far from the first tool I want to grab I figure I should give OJS a shot. Web browsers have been the best way to distribute and share applications for a long time now so I think its time that I invest some time to learn something better than a plotly diagram or jup...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 317  | May 7, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference. —Elie Wiesel I don’t think this one needs any explanation. But I will provide some anyway because this is my site and I do what I want.   Let’s define this term: a. A neutral stance is a posture to take for certain activities to help you avoid injur...

The New Pope is Pope Leo XIV (pre-Pope name is Robert  Prevost).  1) Pope names are one of the few places we still use Roman Numerals. I saw an article that was probably satirical that Americans prefer Roman Numerals (the numbers Jesus used) over Arabic Numerals. Also note that Pope Francis did not have a Roman Numeral- that is because he is the first Pope Francis. They could call him Pope Francis I now, rather than later, to avoid having to rewrite things. (John Paul I took the name John Paul...

So it turns out that rotavating (tilling) is really bloody hard work! Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is great, and you're great for using it. ❤️ Reply to this post by email ● Sign my guestbook So it turns out that rotavating (tilling) is really bloody hard work! ...

Helping scientists with my Pis and GPU continues Helping scientists with my Pis and GPU continues

When asked which programming language to learn first - especially for kids - my usual answer is JavaScript [1] . Nothing beats the direct feedback you get from code that's able to paint things on the screen, without having to install anything. One library that makes it a particularly pleasant process is p5.js , which was created specifically for this educational purpose. I've had good experience teaching kids basic programming using p5.js. Here's a simple example of what I mean: (You...

In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the 386 has a 16-byte instruction prefetch queue. The purpose of the prefetch queue is to fetch instructions from memory before they are needed, so the processor usually doesn't need to wait on memory while executing instructions. Instruction prefetching takes advantage of times when the processor is "thinking" and the memory bus would otherwise be unused. In ...

Hey peoples! Tonight, some meta-words. As you know I am fascinated by compilers and language implementations, and I just want to know all the things and implement all the fun stuff: intermediate representations, flow-sensitive source-to-source optimization passes, register allocation, instruction selection, garbage collection, all of that. It started long ago with a combination of curiosity and a hubris to satisfy that curiosity. The usual way to slake such a thirst is structured higher educa...

Co-Authored-By: @scootaloose.com Windows has been a pain in the ass as of late. Sure, it works, but there's starting to be so much overhead between me and the only reason I bother booting into it these days: games. Every so often I'll wake up to find out that my system rebooted and when I sign in I'm greeted with yet another "pweez try copilot >w< we pwomise you will like it ewe" full-screen dialogue box with "yes" or "nah, maybe later" as my only options. That or we find out that the...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter, where we feature desk tours with makers and creators. Name: Richard Hug Location: Zurich, Switzerland Occupation: Product Manager, Designer, Hobbyist, Gamer Room size: 20 m² (215 ft²) Cost of setup: ~5K CHF ($6K) Website: Richie Hug Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself I’m Richie Hug — a Swiss‑Mexican product‑and‑design nerd from Zurich, Switzerland. Outside of work, I’m into gaming (mostly horror or AAA game...

Last week I ran a Form Design Mastery live call with the UX team at Multiverse. Various members of the team shared their designs for me to review. Here I’ll show you Jamie’s redesign because it shows how good design leads to more problems. For context, the form allows users to log “off the job” learning. Here’s the original design: The category drop down has a bunch of downsides such as: Some users try to type into them Some users think the focused option is the se...

One might think that knowing myself should come naturally to me. After all, I’ve spent my entire life with myself, so I should, in theory, know a thing or two about who I am. And yet, one thing I realised recently, since I’m spending more energy trying to understand how my brain works, is that there are a lot of things I do that are driven by traits of my character that I never paid too much attention to. For example, pretty much all side projects I’ve worked on over the past few years r...

A few weeks ago, I attended a software engineering seminar focused on the role of large language models in programming. The distinguished software engineering professors in attendance were notably skeptical, frequently dismissing the technology’s potential. During a break, I turned to a senior professor, a longtime colleague, and playfully remarked, “ChatGPT writes better C++ than you!” The comment was partly in jest, given our years of camaraderie, but it carried a kernel of conviction. I...

Phi-4 Reasoning Microsoft recently released the phi-4 reasoning model as well as its technical report. They explore using supervised finetuning as well as synthetic dataset curation to train phi-4 a 14B parameter model to compete with and often outperform significanly larger models such as DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. We present Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion parameter model supervised fine-tuned on Phi-4 [2], and Phi-4-reasoning- plus obtained by a further round of reinforcement learning...

The webpage "Double Pendulum – Anson’s Projects" discusses the creation of a double pendulum using Observable JS, a tool for interactive visualizations. The author expresses a desire to explore new data visualization tools beyond traditional methods like plotly diagrams or Jupyter notebooks. They reflect on their previous experience with a double pendulum project done in Python and Processing.js, which gained popularity online. The webpage includes a video link showcasing the original projec...

Last time I talked about de-optimizing mapgen4 so that I could more easily create experiments. I wanted to share one of those experiments. I recently assembled some of my existing ingredients into something that was just plain fun to watch, and I wanted to share this simulation of traders moving around a map: Trader simulation Conceptually, each dot on this simulation represents a trader following a path between two random points. The first ingredient is a pathfinding ...